Tag Archives: NAFTA

There was a point in my mother’s dementia when she could engage in a ten minute conversation with an acquaintance or stranger without the person discovering that she, my mother, could not tell you her address, age, the date or day of the week. She was adept at the speechisms, the smiles, the nods, the all-purpose declarations of pleasantness, of good weather, of well being, of the “So nice to see you again”, “lovely weather we’re having” kind of remark.

In a perverse sort of way it reminds me of Donald. Though his fill-ins, rather than being pleasantries, are a rather random assortment of extreme declarations: bad, very bad, terrible, horrible, disastrous, disgraceful to wonderful, terrific, great, best, like you’ve never seen before.

Note that both “lovely weather we’re having” and “like you’ve never seen before” work adequately no matter the reality.

Donald probably knows his addresses (they are easy to remember), the date, his handicap, the names of his children, but he clearly knows little else. His throwaway statements of “big league” and “disaster” stir his audience, but they also hide a chasm of knowledge and a lack of any detailed understanding.

We can be sure that when he rants about the dairy industry, Canada, and NAFTA, he knows nothing about these subjects. When he tells Fox News interviewer Maria Bartiromo about the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen” and how he leaned across and told the President of China that he had just launched 59 missiles “at Iraq”, it wasn’t a slip of the tongue in a rapid conversation. Maria corrected him, simply saying, “You mean Syria?” He repeated her “Syria” without blinking, and went back to talking about dessert.

But he is POTUS and so the pundits, politicians, reporters, experts, panel members all try to find meaning, thought, policy, and direction in his utterances. Beside my own mother’s dementia it conjures images of courtiers, earls, and nobles trying to find wisdom in an idiot king’s sighs and passing of gas.

I think Trudeau and Merkel understand this. Let’s hope Kim, Xi, and Vladimir do as well.